Joyce Barrass

Yorkshire lass, poet, writer, dreamer, birder, photo-snapper, railway-child, cloud-spotter, genealogist, rainbow-chaser, laughter-lover.

Joyce was once described as "having a pen where her mouth should be." As a child, she won a writing competition judged by Sir John Betjeman for which the prize was a tin of chocolate. This cemented writing in the author's mind as a "good thing". As a teen, she wrote and performed poems, songs, stories and comic monologues to anybody who would listen. Her beloved pastime grew into a lifetime's passion for writing. The natural world remains a deep delight in her life, along with digging up her ancestors' histories, source of much inspiration in her fiction.

Joyce's debut novel "Goatsucker Harvest" is a slice of historical fantasy set in 1855, a dollop of Yorkshire whimsy, a frisson of mystery, a glimpse into stunning hidden places, a spinning of sails, a whiff of menace, a heartwarming of romance, a turning of pages in the dead of the night.

She loves to write short fiction to appeal to all your senses. Her contemporary fiction story "The Butterfly Wall" appeared in Writers' Forum magazine (January 2011) She has future plans for a collection of her short stories to be available on Amazon Kindle, as well as her upcoming second novel "Cloudhover Solstice."

Wearing her liturgical hat, Joyce's past publishing credits include:

Companion to the Revised Common Lectionary: Vol 4 All Age Worship Year C, (Epworth Press, Oct 2000) which she was commissioned to write by the Methodist Church in Great Britain to provide lively worship material to appeal to young and old alike.

She also made various poetic contributions to:

Touching the Pulse:Worship and Where We Live -Sandy Williams (editor) (Stainer and Bell, 31 Mar 1996), also available on Amazon.

Her quirky but house-trained blog can be found at:

http://jobiskaspinwheel.blogspot.co.uk/